The Death of Mudbox Hub

Made a decision this morning, a one I've been putting off for over a year. I've not been a big person who visits forums for about 2 years now. So I am giving someone the chance to take over mudboxhub.com as I simply don't have the time or inclination to run it anymore. To be blunt it makes no difference to me if it survives or not although I would be a little sad to see the forum go and vanish into internet oblivion as it not only gets a lot of hits still and ranks high in Google but was the 1st post Autodesk buyout forum dedicated to Mudbox. (It was created simply as the Mudbox community asked time and time again for a dedicated forum once again....never as a ego trip because as my wife would tell you my ego can be big enough without any help from a forum *joke*)

But before I simply killed it and switched it off I thought I would give the Mudbox community a chance to keep it going if they wish, but either way it won't be me running it. What I am not interested in is it being absorbed into another forum or site as that negates the whole idea of an independent and dedicated forum.

So if anyone does want to take over completely the Mudbox Hub forum ASAP then let me know. Now anyone who is interested should move fast as I am not dicking around on this and don't want to waste any time on it. I simply do not have the time or inclination to run that place anymore. It had a lot of firsts that I'm a bit proud of....for example it was only the 2nd 3D place online to open a subscription streaming service, the 1st plug-ins for Mudbox were made available there including MudWalker which has since spawned a plethora of clones. After the massive video tutorial dump I did a month or so back I said back then that there was a very good chance it'd be the last big dump of tutorials on Mudbox ....maybe for good or for a very considerable time. I stand by that.

I feel it's time for others to do a lot of tutorials for Mudbox for free. I've done my share and about 600 other peoples share as well over the years lol. In my time in 3D I've released 13 DVD's and hundreds upon hundreds of hours of free videos and feel to be blunt that I have done more than enough for now. I could keep on going and putting a shed load of videos out but right now there is little point or even motivation for me to.

What worries me most is that now I am seen as a lecturer who happens to be an artist and freelancer...when reality I am a freelance artist who just happens to teach now and again to try and help people starting out. I'm in the process of changing my life a bit and simplifying things. While I've always worked long hours, these days there is less inclination for the majority of those hours to be for videos and emails bailing others out for free. At the age of 40 I don't feel like I want to have yet another thing to absorb time out of my life that I could be spending either with my wife and kids or actual paid work.

As I mentined earlier I have been putting off this decision for the last year and a half. Its a decision there is no going back from, and I do warn anyone I am looking at some either taking it over within days .... or it will be reduced to a simple splash page and a few videos. It makes no difference to me either way.

The deadline is Sunday 10th July. I should also point out this is NOT the domain but running the site I am talking about. The domian is worth too much to simple give away.

FXPHD, End User Event, My Camera Stolen and other stuff

OK I can finally announce that I've been asked by FXPHD to give a term of lessons this year for them. The details can be found here: LINK : under MOD 301: Advanced Enviroment Modelling

I will say this is not just Mudbox and will use at least one other app and is not aimed at beginners. It covers the creation of the entire interior of Durham cathedral so it can be matched to a Chroma shot. Durham is unique in some ways because:

• 1. You're not allowed to take photos of video inside so reference collection was a big problem. (One with a patent Wayne solution as usual)
• 2. It has very few repeating elements in the cathedral interior...raging from subtle differences to total changes.
• 3. as its to match a chroma shot the result must be photoreal

So it's fair to say this is something a bit different for me to cover.,...there will be absolutely no orcs, monsters, creepy weird thingies... or usual stuff you'd associate with the things I may be known for doing. As it is a interior of a working religious building it wouldn't be very polite to smother it in monsters.

I'm just back from Holland where I lectured on my short 'Of Gods & Men pt1' at the end user event in Utrecht and then had some one on one training in Mudbox to give someone yesterday. The lectures were both full rooms and went well. The social side of EUE was rather good as well this year. I met many old friends and a few new ones.

I also on the day travelling there managed to get my camera bag with my 550D, sigma 30mm 1.4 lens, 14mm prime and Sankor anamorphic setup stolen at Almere train station. So if you are offered this cheap in Holland there's a damn good chance its mine. It wasn't insured.... and chances of getting it back will probably be zero so as such any work on Of Gods & Men Pt 2 will have to wait until I can afford a few one. That may be a while.

I got so sick of the sight of OGAM by the time I declared pt 1 done that I right now feel like I never want to see the dam thing ever again. It really was project insanity in many ways as the whole thing was not just a step but a massive bounding leap outside my comfort zone. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to have done something crawling with nasty monsters with a night /blue colour grade. but where is the fun in doing that? Although there is both a horror film and a thriller film I have had in my head for ages I would like to make at some point.

I grew to hate the fact that OGAM started taking on a life of its own which added no end of pressure to the situation. So much so that I made a decision that if/ when I do either pt 2 or anything else I will not say a word to anyone outside my family until it is done.

But bottom line is it was made on a budget of £25 and 95% totally on my own.

[EDIT]Ok sorry guys but I'm simply not happy enough with the results to put my name to them, so I've locked down the video and removed the link. What I didn't like is the hype that started all on its own, this is something I certainly didn;t want. But either way simply too many things went wrong in too short a time to put out the quality I could have. Those of you that saw it in the 24 hours that it was up and live hopefully realise how many barriers it broke new ground in. (3.36 billion polygons worth of skeltons without instances on a single machine is pretty revolutionary I think its safe to say) who knows....maybe one day I'll remake it and finish it in a way I'm happy with. To everyone else, sorry but its my name that stuck on this and the buck stops with me no matter what went wrong behind the scenes. Although I remain happy with the shots that were 100% CGI with no plates that no one spotted. ;) [/EDIT]

Everything that could go wrong did..... could list all the things but I doubt anyone would believe all that shit could go wrong in a single 2 month period.

For me the greatest things to come out of it were the apps, tech, plugins and scripts I wrote either to help with it...or that are nearly ready now but weren't while making it. They aren't things I have any plans on selling at any point as to be truthful until I get my life back on track I need every edge over my competitors I can get.

Making it took me to the edge of sanity and back again so I don't have great feelings about the experience.

Streaming LIVE from End User Event

I'm off to lecture at the End User Event so while I'm there I'll be doing some live streams that you can reach here:

Or by going to this link: http://bambuser.com/channel/WayneRobson

there may well be drinking and an overall party atmosphere....there may well be well known 3D personages doing odd things on camera .... rarely will it be sane, sober or restrained.

Of Gods & Men Pt1: Done!

Ok, so my last post was sort of my cracking round the edges due to insane self imposed deadline post. if you'd asked me then I'd have told you that there was no way in cold hard hell I could finish part one of my short film 'Of Gods& Men'. There was simply not enough time to render it all and edit it the way I wanted to. I had at once point yesterday 80 hours minimum of render times left on my single machine capable of rendering the crowd produced by my app 'Exodus' and only 72 hours to do it in. The sums simply didn't add up......

Then I had one of my patent Wayne 'fantastic new ideas'. I create a very simple render engine that that OpenGL based that would allow me to output the flat diffuse passes for some shots of the armies of man and the army of the dead. This saved enough time so I could render out a AO pass with a custom shader I wrote for Renderman. Its fair to say without the copy of Renderman Pixar gave me...Ivd never have finished this in time. So much so that they get a special thankyou in the credits.

So today around 1pm I finished the final edit of 'Of Gods & Men'. So now I just have to trawl through zillions of files to round stuff up for end user event for my lectures. Tomorrow I have to do a shot for something for a client / firm that I'll announce in a few days once the embargo is lifted (if you're at the End User Event you will get a sneak preview of the news), sorry to be all cloak and dagger but an embargo is an embargo.

The idea for the army of men and the army of the dead come obviously from the old Ray Harryhausen stuff he did on sinbad and the orginal clash of the titans. Those are my dads favorite films and the thoght occured to me years back why not have an army of them and not just 6 or seven. I answered that question myself in the making of this short as its a fucking logistical nightmare to render in 3D thats why lol. AO passes take miles longer due to all the bones near each other. Where as a character scene took maybe 2 mins a frame (I was doing some clever stuff if I do say so myself to get it down even to this), the skeletons took 5-10 mins a frame at lowest possible render setting.

So in the making of part 1 I've went the full gamut of emotions, its nearly drove me insane and half to death in equal measure. I've not been to bed before 3 or 4am in so long I can't remember..and stress levels started running dangerously high the last few weeks (hence my drama queen moment in the post before this one). Are there things I'd like to change...yeah sure there are, but for a budget of £25 and a time of 2 months 95% of the work done solo I think it'll stand up well.

I'm going to have a word with a few 3D mates....as it people who are real but work in 3D ..and are mates...I'm talking not about talking to imaginary 3D models here lol. anyways...I want to have a word with them and see if they ting I should keep part 1 back till part 2 is done (which could take quite some time as there are some seriously challenging shit in it) or put it out as part 1. Right now I'm ping ponging back and forth between elation and finally not having to look at another skeleton or fucking dragon for a while and an odd empty feeling coz it's done.

So yet again I snatch a win back from the brink of failure .... as I said once before I don't 'do' failure..not even a little bit. As a result of this short I've got some seriously nice apps and tech all of my own no one else has...or is going to have. That will have a longer lasting effect than the actual short on my workflows I'm betting

Of Gods and Men....or not.....

raw poly model for the army of men...I have load of these now lol

Ok so the trailer for Of Gods and men has went live (which I had to bang out in 30 mins after 750 miles of train rides to and from Leamington Spa and back, after a last minute request for a trailer for EUE). After working on this and the many things that have went wrong around my short like a cloud of badness, it's got to the stage where I can almost no longer look at it. After writing brand new aps such as exodus to basically do what massive does..only my way and thus meaning I don't have to fork out a fortune for massive..... and many other things such as an auto skinning plug in for max and Maya (that came too late for the 1st part of my short), I have came to the stage where due to the compromises I've had to make due to every render engine I own dying on me (sticking 3.3 billion polys work of animated skeleton army will do that for any render engine it seems lol) I have been reduced to diffuse only passes from 3delight.

look no motion blur lol

That alone kills me as I know what it'd look like with the right passes to play with in comp instead of having to find a way to hack it together to make it look 'passable'. That was never the aim. The original dragon rig (which is what you see in the trailer) is seriously fucked up...you cannot parent it to a spline path in any way due to the rig being broke (I didn't rig it lol), there was 2 other rigs done by some mates but alas they arrived too late to render that stuff out as it was taking 20 mins a frame without motion blur. Even Breitbilds render farm can't be handed over for free for the length of time it would have taken.

I had every single bug ever recorded pop up in every single app I've used in some cases causing the whole thing to grind to a halt for days and in one occasion a week and a half..... I've had people who swore blind they would help pull out for various reasons which meant it went from 'Wayne makes a nice short with help from a few mates in 4 months' to 'Wayne tries to save his short with zero help in 2 months with broken software.

After months of pulling till 3am and 4am each night 7 days a week I'm as near burnt out on this project as I want to get. To put it very bluntly I'm sick to fucking death ot it and am very close to saying 'fuckit' and doing something else for end user event.

close up of one of the skeleton scenes in Exodus (notice low res sheild to try and save to enormous polycount)

Why? as I know that every problem or issue with that short whether my fault or not, stops with me... I'm not the sort of bloke to go naming names and trying to spread the shit around. So here are a few images that are from the dev of 'of gods and men', some that were lost back when I lost a month's worth of work on it after a drive went bang. They may be more representative of what's went on behind it than the actual trailer or the short itself.

An image (oneof only 2 that survive) from the lost months worth of work

Times ran out, there is no way to make this better at this stage. I have a choice to either suck it up and chalk it down to a bad deal or throw my toys out of the pram and can it completely. The jury's still out as to how adult I'll be over it after months of my life spent on it. Simply put as it stands it doesn't match the vision I've had in my head for 23 years. Maybe I've just been overworking...I dont know.

Exodus alpha version 1 results.....no animtion and no use or more than one model back then...its much differnt now.

OGAM (Of Gods & Men)...crunch time.

I've been a bit quiet of late for a number of reasons. The one that's brought me the most stress and been the hardest to deal with is the making of my short 'Of Gods & Men'. It become obvious a little while back that any hope I had of getting it done by my 2nd day of Lectures at the End User Event in Holland at the end of this month was impossible due to events outside my control. You may think that that was pretty self apparent anyway when you're trying to make a film quality short on a budget of £25, 90% of the time on your own. Had I been able to put the time in I needed , then there was a very good chance it would have been done.

So I made a decision to finish half of it and in the spirit of the last Harry Potter book split it into 2 shorts (that I'll release eventually as a single short.) Hey if it's good enough for holly wood its good enough for me lol. This should have made things far easier, but that's not exactly the case, as I still have 3/4 absolute nightmare shots to finish and render out. It's the rendering that's taking the time as these shots are :

A - created using my own app 'Exodus' (don't worry I'm not going to release it as it'd be a legal minefield lol)

B - as such they can only be rendered on my machine

C - The render farm I've had use of doesn't have a Renderman compliant render engine ,on it which is what HAS to be used for those shots

D - They have raw polygon counts that are between 100million and 750 million (not counting displacement maps...and all of those polys are animated. I'm pretty sure most people don't want me blowing up their render farm

As exodus is only for me, and is a mish mash of all sorts of crazy code from all sorts of places, it's about as stable as an Italian taxi driver behind 2 nuns in a tractor. This doesn't make for an easy workflow and many man hours have disappeared either on development or solving crazy issues. (such as it suddenly deciding to render bright purple using a constant shader and dump all animation ...Just for shits and giggles it seemed lol. Or the time a forgotten floating point interferred with animation on some characters making them all look like they were having spaz attacks.) That doesn't do good things for your stress levels as come what may I have to have this ready for a complete breakdown on my 2nd En User Event lecture.

I've also had in development for myself only a mental ray PTEX enabling shader, and my own propriety 1 click auto rig and skin solution....and a few other things I'll keep to myself. But alas these items mentioned simply were nowhere near ready for use in even a personal short as stability needs to be worked on. My idea behind developing them is mainly so I can have apps that do what very expensive ones do without having to resort to piracy. Which I cannot and will not condone.

This way I have no license fees to pay, I don't have to wait ages for support emails as I can fix it myself, and if it doesn't do exactly what I need it to I can simply research and add the feature myself. Another reason I won't be putting them out for sale or for free is twofold. Firstly, as not only are there other apps that do these jobs nearly as well (or in some cases better), but also its a mash up of various source code and legally it'd mean I'd make buttons anyway. Secondly I want a set of tools to do certain jobs easily that no one else has to give me an edge in production. I don't want to give my best tools to everyone. Harsh but honest.

Thankfully although I am convinced that this short is cursed due to the sheer amount of things that have went wrong, sometimes nice things pop up that help in some way. So I was surprised today to have a message on twitter from one of the guys working for Pixar on the Renderman side offering a free 1 month license so I could get my short finished (or the 1st part anyway)..Hopefully once that's up and running I won't be reduced to the single core frame at a time crap that I am having to put up with from 3delights free version lol. As I can then use 2 machines and all my cores to render it should...in theory mean I can get the 1st part of my short done.

Of course there are still only 24 hours in the day so let's have a little list of what's left to do before EUE on the 30th June / 1st July.

The List of Doom:

1. · all the complex high poly animated scenes need rendering out , inc passes
2. · final soundtrack edit
3. · final short edit
4. · compositing
5. · final colour grading
6. · write lecture script for both lectures
7. · do breakdown videos for EUE
8. · Sort the PowerPoint presentations out.
9. · Make beginning and end final titles for short
10. · final encodes of short in various resolutions and colour levels (so I can keep it looking perfect no matter what the projectors colour balance).
11. · Round up and arrange all files used
12. · Do sculpt tests for 1st lecture
13. · organise private course for a teaching gig just after EUE.
14. · Have nervous breakdown

That's a list of the top of my head and I KNOW I have left stuff out. Once EUE 2011 is over with I will then have to try and finish of rendering the complex scenes that will be left for the 2nd part of my short before the Renderman license runs out. A big thanks to the guys at Pixar for the helping hand with the free Renderman for a month.

There can't be many times a blokes CGI short is bailed out by Pixar lol. If by some miracle I have time free I'll put an unreleased shot or two up from my short nearer the time.

Wayne Robson RIP

Apprently I am dead and have been since the 4th April this year, although I have to admit that I'm looking pretty good for a dead guy. I shall of course be sure to eat brains and hang around deserted shopping centers shouting 'BRAINS!!!'. I am pleased that death has not impeaded my ability to type. Although my wife has pointed out that I am looking a bit odd after 2-3 months of only sleeping 2 or 3 hours a night. When they say long hours kill ya they aren't fucking joking, I've been so busy on my short I didn't realise I was dead lol. It also explains a sudden fear of shotguns. :)

OK so you got me...I'm not realy dead. However did you guess?

But my namesake the Actor Wayne Robson is.... so as he shared my name, or visa vera depending how you look at it and how big your ego is (guilty lol) I thought he deserved a special blog post. He was the sort of obbing actor who never won a pile of awards, he was just a guy doing what he loved and did well. He's in all sorts of things and a BIG pile of the old disney movies. Like me he didn't always see eye to eye with the system as it stood / stands. It was a odd feeling reading about someone wiht t same name as you being dead I wont deny. However at least now we won't get mixed up on google anymore lol.

This does inspire me to go all 'Jet Li ' in the film'The One' on your asses. (Where he kills all other version in other universes of himself. ) Hey I always did like highlander....now where's my sword... :) (After all there can be only one). :)

But cutting aside my sick sense of humor for just a moment, quite simply to the man who shared a name with me:
Wayne Robson, Rest in Peace.